Prologue

The ship moves through the vast nothingness of the hypercosm, like a great fish swimming amidst the shoals of eternity.

Swimming... moving...

No.

These words are not correct. There can be no movement here in this no-place where neither Time nor Space dare to trespass. I must ask your forgiveness for these minor linguistic imprecisions. It is impossible to speak precisely about things unreal.

Let us begin again...

The ship. It is large, at least by human standards. Fish-shaped, as I have mentioned. Long and slender, like a blade. Yet if you could see the ship (you cannot, of course; not here in the hypercosm where there exists neither light to see by, nor eyes to see) but if you could see it, if you could, I believe the characteristic that would impress itself most deeply upon your consciousness--the thing which you would notice first and which would linger in your memory long after the vessel had passed from sight--would not be the size of it, nor the shape, but the color.

It is red.

And not just any red, mind you. This is a deep, painful scarlet that stings the retina. The color of human blood, fully oxygenated, would be an approximate analog.

For that reason, a human such as yourself might guess that this is a warship, that the bloody hue is intended to instill fear, but that is not the case. Within the known universe, blood comes in a variety of colors, far too many to count. As for warships, they usually come cloaked.

This is one of the Emperor’s Scarlet Ships, designed to transport the spoils of war: females taken from freshly conquered worlds, bound for their new home in the Imperial Harem, which is expanding almost as quickly as the cosmos itself. There are hundreds of Scarlet Ships in the Emperor’s fleet, but this particular vessel is recently departed from Earth, and it carries within its red hull a thousand human souls. A thousand women. A thousand concubines.

And among them one who, though she does not know it, is destined to change the course of the universe forever.

She does not know it yet; she will soon find out.

Observe.

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